Towards a Computational Treatment of Time
Dov M. Gabbay, Mark A Reynolds · 1995
Abstract This chapter is about topics relevant to the algorithmic handling of time, both in pure logic and in computing. It attempts to present a unified point of view, where computational and mathematical properties of the logic of time are interwoven in an intrinsic way. This is not difficult to do. Time is a very exciting subject. It is one of the few subjects on which everyone is an expert. We move through time continuously and in order to survive and manage ourselves sensibly we constantly have to make temporal decisions. Philosophy, since the days of Aristotle, has been trying to analyse the way we make these decisions. With the rise of computer science, where ideally one wants the machine to do the job for or of the human, there is a new urgency in the precise logical analysis of human temporal activity.